Happy day – today we released Fedora 12 Beta. You can get it here. The full set of editions is immediately available.

We’re really pretty happy with this release: we think the quality is excellent for a beta release, and the level of new features and improvements over its predecessors is great. I linked to the release announcement, which highlights some of those improvements, a couple of days ago. Just to go over the highlights again:

Probably most obviously to most people, there have been many bugfixes and improvements in video and audio support. Nouveau has gone from strength to strength, with default KMS support, suspend / resume support, easy display spanning support and many fixes for problematic cards and chips. The Intel graphics driver is far, far better behaved than it was in Fedora 11 (and other distributions of its time period). Radeon has its fair share of fixes too, and experimental 3D acceleration for r600 chips is available. Audio – both at the kernel and PulseAudio levels – has received a lot of bug fixes, and some exciting new features. Bluetooth audio devices now show up just like any other – no special configuration required, just pair a device, go to gnome-volume-control and select it for output and/or input. gnome-volume-control now exposes appropriate choices of input connectors in a nice clean interface. You can easily enable and disable S/PDIF output, or analog surround output, from g-v-c with PulseAudio’s new profile support. Truly a new vista of awesomeness.

But those most prominent changes are just scratching the surface. There’s a first cut at completely open source Broadcom wireless support. Performance of the 32-bit edition should be improved with tweaks to the default compilation settings. NetworkManager has easy support for broadband adapters and Bluetooth PAN tethering. You can install and use Moblin as your desktop with a single command. You can try out gnome-shell easily. GNOME 2.28 and KDE 4.3 are included.

It’s just one big bundle of fantastic. Go get it now! What are you still here for?!

One Response

Can we use Fedora12 with poulsbo GMA500 ?
Your patches (http://adamwill.fedorapeople.org/poulsbo_f12/src/)seem not enought to make it work properly, but I don’t know with which MESA version did you try it. Any news about it ? We’ll try to make it work with Xserver 1.7 + kernel 2.6.31 + xorg 7.5 + mesa ?